I’ve had a Nextbase 612GW for over a year now (that’s the Amazon link there). It records in 4k – meaning that you can see number plates and other details much further away and much more clearly than on other dashcams.
I’m actually on my second unit. Within a year, my first one stopped turning on automatically, and after discussions with Nextbase, they gave me an authorisation code so that Amazon would accept the return and refund me. I bought another in lieu of the refund.
What had happened was that the internal battery had died. It would barely run for 30 seconds after a four hour recharge, and since it is the battery that provides the camera with enough residual power to detect when the power systems in the car are activated (which tells it to turn on and start recording), it was kaput. It worked perfectly if I powered it on manually each morning once a bit of charge had gone to the battery, but any power down lasting more than an hour and the battery would drain again.
Any 4k video device right now gets warm when it is in use, and the 612GW is no exception. I wouldn’t say it gets hot, but certainly very warm, and with the summer we had in 2018, it got warmer still. Li-ion and Li-Po batteries are degraded by high temperatures, and I suspect that overall this contributed to the battery going as quickly as it did. OK, it may also have been a bad batch (or just a bad one in my case), but I didn’t go into that with Nextbase. I’d had it replaced, after all.
It is worth noting that Nextbase told me replacing the battery is quite easy, and they supply them if you ask. It does involve a bit of soldering, but I will bear it in mind for the future.
As I understand it, some cheaper dashcams use a capacitor to hold residual power. However, where a battery is involved, this problem of degradation could occur with any model of camera. Indeed, any battery-based dashcam will effectively “break” sooner or later once the battery dies. Exactly the same thing happens with laptops, phones, and tablets – and it is amazing how many people don’t realise it’s just a dud battery which, in many cases, could easily be replaced. It even used to happen with desktop computers, when the coin battery which held the BIOS settings that enabled the PC to boot died (I’ve replaced a fair few of those in the past for people who thought their PC was broken).
I suspect that a lot of the complaints you see about dashcams dying could be a result of this – along with using the wrong types of SD card.